


The Merits of My Cause

by anonymous_sibyl



Category: The 4400
Genre: Gen, twicetoldfandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-06
Updated: 2007-07-06
Packaged: 2017-10-03 08:12:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymous_sibyl/pseuds/anonymous_sibyl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Who lives in the future and pulls our strings?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Merits of My Cause

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [](http://community.livejournal.com/twicetoldfandom/profile)[**twicetoldfandom**](http://community.livejournal.com/twicetoldfandom/).
> 
> This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/). None of the media or characters written about in my fanfiction belong to me and I make no profit from these works.

We told people that we wanted to make things better, but that wasn't true. We wanted to make things perfect. The world as it existed naturally wasn't good enough for us. It was chaotic and confused, the disarray displeased us. Soon enough we learned that we lacked the abilities to bring order to our world, so we settled for bringing control.

Promicin was our control. It gave us abilities that others did not have and allowed us to make changes, ones we told ourselves were for the better. We were so very willfully wrong.

What was our mistake? Was it the Promicin itself? Was it reserving its use for those we deemed worthy? Or was it when we tampered with our own history, taking people from their times and changing them, manipulating them to achieve the powers we wanted, then sending them back through time to one destination while we waited for the inevitable explosion?

Jordan Collier was meant to die. We knew someone would see the value of Promicin, we just hoped they'd use it the way we wanted, to create the perfect world we'd engineered. Collier, of course, wanted to create his own world, for the betterment of all. We recognized that excuse; it was ours at one time.

The assassin was created as a failsafe. He would be activated if things began to go wrong, and they activated him. I say "they" because I took no part in that. I saw the benefit in Jordan Collier, so I took him and taught him, then sent him back. He wasn't the first I'd taken, but he was the only one I'd taken in secret. He was my creation, my perfect god, savior of all mankind. He would fix every mistake we had made and would make. He would be my atonement. He could take it all away.

They found out, of course. I was a scientist and a dreamer, I was never any good at moving people like pawns, and I was particularly bad at hiding my pleasure in Collier. They never asked me why. So secure in their own motivations and so unquestioning of their own lies, they thought I was the same. They trusted everything I had told them since the beginning, they believed I had learned what I knew from studying the past and extrapolating the future.

In the end, they brought him to me, my former allies leading my last hope in chains. They thought this would end things, that having him here would strip us of our powers and make it all go away. It was what I told them I wanted.

He was younger than I remembered him being, and I feared for a moment they had taken him from the wrong time.

"I know you now," he said. "They mentioned your name." He tilted his head as if cataloguing the intervening years. "Should they have?"

It no longer mattered and I told him that. I brushed his shirt with my fingers, searching for one last premonition, one vision to tell me if I had done the right thing. Before I could find one, my fingers slipped and brushed his skin. I felt his gift working on me, felt it as it drained the power from my mind.

"We have to go back," I told him. "But this time I won't know what to do." I gasped as the shock of it rolled over me. "I won't know what will happen."

He smiled gently at me. "That's okay, Maia. We'll be fine."


End file.
